My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.
People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?
Now people look at the ads and the product placement. If you want to sell millions of a device, that's how you do it.
I start by excluding the ones with literal malware and after that the primary determinant is price, because if it's going to be rapidly disposable anyway then there's no point in making a large investment.
"Let's force them to buy a new phone more often" is the kind of first year on the job MBA move that sounds profitable on paper as long as you fail to notice that the average Android phone now sells for less than a third of the price of the average iPhone. And that's revenue; the difference in margins is even bigger.
It's certainly not common enough that you see mentions about it on HN or Reddit - and yet, you see mentions of adjacent things like requests for tech support. So, it's clearly not very common.
The premise of asking for a recommendation is that the tech has already done the research (e.g. for themselves) and can provide a two word answer off the top of their head. There is little reason to complain about this on a message board or even bother to remember when it happens. But it does.
You even admit to doing it yourself. How many swings of a $400 purchase from one vendor to another does it take per capita to be enough to care about?
...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases, and nowhere near "iPhone prices" for Pinephones. Samsung cares about money, and their current strategy is far more lucrative than selling very small amounts of Librem devices at modest profit margins.
iPhone SE is $399. PinePhone Pro is $399. Samsung is averaging ~$250.
> ...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases
They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.
Meanwhile no change to the hardware is required and Samsung could carry on selling to everyone they currently do, plus all of those people.
This whole comments section is full of people complaining about this. If you give them a choice between two otherwise fungible phones, one that has open source drivers etc. and can therefore run an up to date vanilla kernel indefinitely, why wouldn't they all choose that one?
The custom Linux phone I make is also sold out! I've made zero units and there are zero available. That is what high demand looks like.
There is clearly more demand than there is supply.
This is the weirdest position to stake out. That nobody wants this because everybody who makes one has a line of customers around the block and mainstream media outlets are writing stories about how much people want this, which go to the front page of tech news aggregators because of all the people who feel the same way.
What evidence of demand are you looking for? A larger production run which is also commercially successful? You can't expect that as a precondition for doing one.
Until Apple bricks your phone with a stealth update because you haven't upgraded quickly enough.
https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-iphones-settlement-idU...
If their phone doesn't have a replaceable battery then blaming the phone is correct.
Upside of the settlement was I got a battery replacement for $30 (performed same day in store) and coming up on 6 years since release the original iPhone SE is still running the latest version of iOS.
OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.
OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
I "upgraded" to a Pixel 6 and Android 12 has been completely fine for me, so it might be certain people. I am aware some of my friends had bugs with Android 12, though.